It is often called blank verse or iambic pentameter. So fair - and foul - a day - I have - not seen. Try saying this aloud while tapping out the rhythm of the five beats to see how it works. The ends of lines are not generally rhymed which helps to maintain the flow of the speech and carry through the meaning of what the character is saying. Sometimes a character is given an unfinished line to say. This is called a half line even if it is less or more than half the five beats. It makes us think about why the line is incomplete — for instance, is it a hesitation or an interruption?
Two or more characters may have a shared line where the five beats are divided up between them. This tends to quicken the pace of the speeches as characters overlap their words.
As I descended? Fair - is foul - and foul - is fair. Again, try saying this aloud while tapping out the rhythm of the four beats to see how it works. These lines are Juliet's words when she sees that Romeo has died:.
Go get thee hence, for I will not away. What's here? A cup clos'd in my true love's hand? Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end. O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop To help me after?
I will kiss thy lips, Haply some poison yet doth hang on them, To make me die with a restorative. Had Romeo not killed Tybalt, Friar would have provided a much better plan to hide Juliet, rather than using poison. After the tragic conclusion of the love scene, Friar tells about the marriage and intrigue. The story ends with the death of star-crossed lovers.
Catastrophe reveals the truth about the origin of Oedipus, after which the Queen Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus stabs his eyes, pleading to be exiled.
Together all these elements make up catastrophe that King Oedipus invites by exploring his birth. Had he not explored, he might have saved himself and his family from this catastrophe.
It happens when Clym goes blind, and the couple faces economic crisis. From these different ways of telling a story follow certain corollaries in respect to plot. Slight inconsistencies in structure are not easily discernible in the epic and in the novel; for when the end is reached, we have forgotten the numerous details of the beginning. But in the drama, which we follow scene by scene on the stage, anything awry is detected at once, and almost as easily as a defect in the figure or in the reasoning of a geometrical proposition, which we grasp at a glance.
Though you have read Macbeth much as you would read any other piece of literature, — for the habit of reading has confounded all forms, — you have probably kept in imagination the stage and the actors coming and going. How carefully the play is put together you cannot fail to notice, if you think of it in contrast with some of the novels with which you are familiar.
The sequence of its incidents possesses the rigidity of logic. The dramatist, in the two or three hours granted him, must select the most important incidents — called dramatic moments — in the career of his hero and bring them to the front, leaving to his audience to fill in by his suggestions what takes place in the intervals.
Thus the reign of Macbeth, according to the chronology followed by Shakespeare, covered seventeen years. Shakespeare, in making a drama out of it, brushed aside many events, confining himself to those which bore some relation to the assassination of Duncan; and even of these, he could not present all. The main dramatic moments of the play are Macbeth's temptation by the witches, his subsequent meeting with his wife, the murder of Duncan, the murder of Ban quo, the appearance of the ghost, the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her son, and the death grapple between Macbeth and Macduff.
What comes between them is in the way of explaining how these events happen. The simpler the plot, the more effective it is on the stage. It was Shakespeare's custom, as in The Merchant of Venice , to weave together deftly two or more stories, and to carry along with them scenes of low comedy to please the rabble in the yard.
Macbeth here differs from the rest. It has but one plot, and interest is focused on a few characters. It contains but one comic scene — the Porter at the gate. For introducing this scene, Shakespeare has often been praised, on the ground that it furnishes a relief to the horror of the assassination. This is undoubtedly its effect on critics and philosophers; and yet it is, I think, nothing more than the vulgar interlude demanded by the Elizabethan audience.
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